President Donald Trump keeps on saying he’ll protect people with pre-existing health conditions even if he succeeds in killing the Affordable Care Act – and, oddly enough, quite a few people appear to believe him. Yet he has no plan for an alternative to the ACA, and he hasn’t said how he me…

From time to time, county and municipal governments face the need to perform economic development planning. Generally, this means outlining priorities for investment in public infrastructure or public services. In some communities, this might be pretty complex, involving some deep thinking a…

I keep pretty good track of changes in the Indiana Code, but I came across one recently that I had missed. As of last year, city police and firefighters no longer have to live inside their county or a bordering county. Now, they can live in a non-bordering county up to 50 miles from city limits.

While technology has done wonders for American quality of life, it’s wreaked havoc on our political system.

The COVID pandemic continues to affect commerce and government in what is clearly the worst year for the economy since the Great Depression. We don’t yet know how deep this will be, but there is growing evidence of an increasingly delayed recovery.

Putting a vice president into the Oval Office is like putting a new Supreme Court justice on the bench. You might think you know what you’re getting, but people who are given such power have an alarming tendency to do whatever they want to.

Editor:

A background to the coming election will be the growing rural-urban divide in America, and how it affects political prospects on the coming decades. Some of the handwringing will be overwrought, but there are a few critical points to consider in the years ahead. Let me try to address some of…

The president of the United States – the leader of the free world, arguably the most powerful person on the planet – has contracted a dangerous virus, and I’m not sure how I should act.

The news that President Donald Trump has contracted the coronavirus has made a very strange year even stranger, and a stressed and battered political system has suffered a new blow. With a bit of prudence and foresight, however, the country can cope.

I’m thinking of doing something different in the gubernatorial election. Some will say I would be wasting my vote.

From time to time it is helpful to think hard about Indiana’s manufacturing economy—what’s been happening to it, where it is going and what the future may hold. This is an election year, which brings with it a series of sordid untruths that need to be rectified. Moreover, the response to the…

The normalization of relations between Israel and two Arab states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, is, on the face of it, a good and beneficial development. The Trump administration deserves credit for brokering it. It has long been an anomaly in Middle Eastern affairs that Arab nation…

In Chad Wolf, President Donald Trump seems finally to have found someone he deems worthy to run the sprawling bureaucracy known as the Department of Homeland Security after months as acting head. He’s the fifth person during this administration to hold the job.

I have wholeheartedly embraced the Kindle experience. It’s been years since I read an actual bound-between-two covers, ink-on-paper book.

The controversial appointment of a new presidential medical adviser has put a national spotlight on a radical disease management concept to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the 2020 census isn’t in a state of crisis, it is awfully close. The coronavirus pandemic, of course, has made pretty much everything about contemporary life in America a lot more difficult. But the problems confronting the 2020 census also have a significant political component, from the…

It has been a study in stark contrasts, from an opening prayer by a Latino minister in Florida, who asked God to bless “all of us, Republican, independent and Democrat,” to yet another train wreck of a speech by President Trump, who warned of “radical left” extremists trying to “abolish the suburbs.”

It seem eons ago now – though only a few years – that Donald Trump capitalized on the soaring stature of the Oval Office to shatter equilibriums with his brand of edicts and outrage. He would roil public discourse for weeks with his claims – that he won the popular vote in 2016 because milli…

In picking California Sen. Kamala Harris to join the Democrats’ 2020 presidential ticket, Joe Biden has shown that, unlike the man currently holding the job he seeks, he’s not afraid of strong women.

When, in 1914, the designers of the New York General Post Office inscribed in stone the words that became the United States Postal Service’s motto – “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” – they clearly did…

President Trump has been challenging the integrity of mail-in ballots for months despite having frequently used them to cast his own votes — much as countless Americans have done largely without incident since the Civil War. Now it’s becoming clear how he hopes to close the chasm between this rhetoric and the reality of a system that works just fine: by undermining it himself.

Postponing elections is what autocracies do. On Friday, Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, announced a delay to September’s planned legislative council (LegCo) elections. Ms. Lam cited the coronavirus public health emergency as her justification. Yet the real reason is Hong Kong’s political emergency. Hong Kong’s elections have been postponed because even with its very limited democracy, Ms. Lam and the Chinese government are afraid the voters will choose a LegCo with greater sympathy for the protests.

One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s presidency is his misuse of power to advance his political cause. He had peaceful protesters forcibly cleared from Lafayette Square so he could walk from the White House to a nearby church for a photo op. He claimed emergency powers to fund border wall construction that Congress refused to approve. And he leveraged the nation’s foreign policy muscle in a failed bid to pressure the president of Ukraine to discredit former Vice President Joe Biden.

Early in my stint on the News-Sentinel’s editorial board, county officials came to lobby for the newspaper’s support of a proposed new tax.

President Donald Trump’s plan to deploy federal law-enforcement officers in cities gripped by protests has so far been a thoroughgoing failure. That isn’t stopping the administration from doubling down.

In a stunning overreach, President Donald Trump’s administration ordered federal agents to police Portland and Chicago protests. This perversion of the federal duty to provide help and stability has provoked righteous anger.

Honest self-reflection begets growth

Few life stories are as humbling as that of John Lewis, a civil rights icon and longtime Democratic congressman from Georgia who died Friday at age 80.

In this time of national nervousness, with pandemic fears and civil unrest widening our already vast political divide, I am just one of the little people waiting for the change our leaders have promised.